State of Exception -- in the communities
September 2023 parade in Tonacatepeque I do not often write in the first person in this space, but as I develop this series of posts at the start of the third year of the State of Exception, it feels important to describe how I have seen El Salvador change during that time. I have spent more than twenty years visiting and getting to know well a small community in the municipality of Tonacatepeque, northeast of San Salvador. This collection of small houses, with water which arrives some of the days, with chickens and dogs and small children roaming the streets, is dear to me. And for most of the time I have known it, the community has been under control of the MS-13 gang. Two years into the State of Exception, the "muchachos" are no longer present, and the difference it makes in people's lives is real and observable. Residents now cross gang boundaries from one territory to another, no longer fearing deadly retribution as a consequence. New little businesses have opened